Investing more in our defences isn’t the problem – but paying for it is

However you spin it, it’s not a good look that a former Labour minister – also a former Nato secretary general and co-author of the government’s Strategic Defence Review – is accusing the government of “corrosive complacency”. Yet that is precisely what George Robertson has done, and he has a point.

The government has certainly tried to make the argument that we are in a new, more insecure world. What it has failed to do is to persuade the British public of the need to make the necessary sacrifices.

Ministers have hardly been backwards when it comes to describing the threat environment in which the UK now finds itself. The armed forces minister, Al Carns, was moved to declare that the country was on a “war footing”. The prime minister has written of the Iran war being a “line in the sand” because the “world today is more volatile and dangerous than at any other point in my lifetime”.

And this seems to have been taken on board by the British public. Public First has undertaken a raft of polling on attitudes towards security and defence, and they found that 85 per cent of Britons think the world is getting more dangerous. Sixty per cent of respondents said it’s the most unstable in their lifetime, and nearly half say Britain isn’t ready to defend itself. Only a third think it is.

So far, so good for a government that, according to Bloomberg, intends to raise defence spending more quickly than it had initially envisaged. But this is where the good news ends. When faced with the kinds of choices that higher defence spending might necessitate, we British are unwilling to make them.

When asked whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes to pay for defence, 43 per cent of Public First’s respondents oppose the idea, while only 28 per cent come out in support. Thirty-nine per cent also opposed the idea that defence could be increased on the back of cuts to public services. And opposition is most stark when the trade-off is between living standards and defence spending, with 51 per cent stating their opposition.

Why is this the case? Part of the answer lies in what the public thinks a “threat” might consist of. When asked what they are most worried an enemy could do to impact their lives, the top answer is cyberattacks to shut down critical digital systems (39 per cent). Direct military attack – soldiers, aircraft, missiles – is the major concern for only 29 per cent. The public perceives the threat as disruptive, not existential.

The issue here is that threats do not seem proximate in either time or space. As a senior Dutch policy maker said to me the other day, with reference to the new “freedom tax” that their country is thinking of instigating to pay for higher defence spending, “You in the UK have a victory day. We have a liberation day.” Brits, in other words, do not have recent experience of fighting for – and in – their homeland.

Geographically, Poland presents an interesting contrast. One need only look at a map to understand why that country is now the highest defence spender in Nato, having essentially doubled its military spending since 2022.

Partly too, though, this is a problem of communication. Thirty-nine per cent of Britons name Russia as the biggest threat to peace, but the public has not connected the dots between the adversary they fear and the specific, existential vulnerabilities that adversary could exploit. The cutting of undersea cables could have catastrophic results. This is a failure of clear communication by the government.

The final part of the answer is still more depressing. While accepting the need to do more to protect ourselves, a majority of UK voters (54 per cent) believe the government already has the money and just needs to reallocate it. In other words, the public views this as a competence problem rather than a resource problem.

This is where the insidious impact of steadily falling trust in politics makes itself felt. People feel let down by politicians and don’t believe that their leaders are making the right decisions. This inevitably impacts their willingness to provide yet more money for – as they see it – governments to waste.

The government needs to think carefully about how to turn this situation around. Hideously difficult fiscal choices await. If the public is to be convinced of their necessity, ministers will need to up their game.

Anand Menon is director of UK in a Changing Europe